A visual object-oriented development environment (VOODE)

Numerous classes, complex inheritance and containment hierarchies, and diverse patterns, all contribute to difficulties in understanding, reusing, debugging and tuning large object-oriented systems. To help overcome these difficulties, we introduce a visual programming methodology and a visual development environment with novel views for development of object-oriented class models. We introduce container and contained object views, direct manipulations as a visual programming tool and show how syntax correctness is achieved by visual programming. Case studies involving browsing and creation of real object-oriented application are presented to demonstrate the benefits of visual programming.The ability to edit and browse existing applications or frameworks with a visual tool, is most important to a new developer who enters an existing project. The learning curve can be reduced and familiarity with a new application can be achieved in a shorter period of time. Moreover, the quantity of information needed to be learned is reduced since visual tools allow the developer to focus immediately only on the relevant parts of the application.